


Fight the Dead

by Erin_Rogoff



Category: OC x Daryl, OC x Daryl Dixon
Genre: AxE, Crossbow, Daryl Dixon x OC, Death, F/M, Fighting, Friendship, Geeks, Loss, Love, Walkers, Weapons, Zombies, daryl dixon - Freeform, friends - Freeform, life - Freeform, melee weapons, possibilities, the walking dead - Freeform, twd, walking dead - Freeform, wd - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-12
Updated: 2016-10-12
Packaged: 2018-08-21 23:40:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8264675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erin_Rogoff/pseuds/Erin_Rogoff
Summary: My friends and I experience the zombie apocalypse first-hand. We journey south to Georgia after several losses and find ourselves stranded on a lonely highway with walkers running amok. Who will help aid us? And will love come into play?





	1. The Beginning of the End

The zombie apocalypse has finally unveiled itself. I knew this day would come. It always happens in the movies - Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, The Walking Dead, World War Z, Zombie Nazis, Dead Snow, et cetera. I could go on from the good zombie movies all the way down the line of five stars to the bad zombie movies.  
With me on this adventure, I have not only weapons but friends as well. I have armed myself with a pistol tucked into my pants, a wasp knife that I once used for scuba diving - it saved me from a thresher shark once when I was in Hawaii - and an axe I took from my garage. Unfortunately for my family, they were lost. My dad died fighting the dead trying to protect the government building he worked in, my mom died trying to protect my brother and me, and my brother 'took off' mentally after the love of his life died. I won't tell you her name but I thought her quite pretty myself. She and my brother were the best of friends before they got together and my brother told me he has no reason to live if everyone he loves is gone. I was insulted and asked him, 'What about me? Am I chopped liver?' My brother told me I was the only thing left he would fight for but then the dead came at us and he sacrificed himself to save me. In that moment, I told myself that if God ever gave me children, I would name my first son Christopher, after my brother.  
I took off and returned to my friends; Abby, Jasmine, and Payge. Once reunited, I went to Abby and embraced her, sobbing and telling her that I lost Christopher. Abby's breath hitched because she cared about my brother, too.  
What Abby said to me next was completely uncalled for. "Are you serious? The world goes to shit and you look like a cheap slut!" I took a step back and looked myself over. My skinny jeans were torn at the knees, my black army boots were a muddy mess, and my black midriff top was torn both at the lower hem and at the neckline, exposing my bra, but only slightly.  
"Abby, how dare you say that! I just lost my brother! I can't even give him a proper burial and you say I look like a whore!? That's so mean!" There were tears in my eyes now and I fell to my knees and sobbed into my hands. "Christopher is gone... Everyone is gone... I have no one left..." I did have my friends but I didn't have my family.  
Believe me, I wanted to die, too, but I remembered a promise I made to my mom a few years back. Three years at the most. I tried to kill myself twice, once by standing in front of a train before getting pushed out of the way by a bystander and then another time by doubling my anti-depressant medication. Both times I failed, and the second time around my mom made me promise to live. If not for me, then for her. I was half-asleep from the medications I was doped up on but I promised my mom I wouldn't kill myself and that was that. I didn't try to kill myself ever again after that.  
That was years ago but still I hadn't made any attempts despite thinking about it a lot after losing Christopher. As the nights passed on, I didn't sleep or eat, and whenever my friends were tired, I would take their night shifts to look out for zombies if they ever came our way. In the little town in which we lived - roughly 25,000 people - there were no massive zombie hoards like there were in the city. I couldn't even imagine how many zombies there were in New York City. I didn't even want to think about it.  
The days turned into weeks and I began suffering from insomnia, becoming who I was before I took sleeping medications. Before then, I could go days without sleeping. My record was five days. I slept every now and then for one to five hours but nothing more than that. I was just barely able to get by and survive the shell of a life I once dreamed of having.  
I wasn't a social person in my life - like my brother was - before the world went to the dead. I was a quiet and smart and I researched survival methods and read books and articles online on how the world could end. I was reading up on something I thought would never happen and even went so far as to taking shooting lessons from the NRA from permission from my dad. I took private lessons on how to survive and fight and I felt I did it just to pass the time, each second closing in on my death to come at an undisclosed time.  
My pack of wolves - my friends and I - moved south from Jersey to where it was warmer. My mom always said she wanted to move to Florida, so that's where we decided to go. I thought long and hard about going that great distance and told my friends what I wanted to do once in Florida: give my family proper burials. Even though I didn't have their bodies, I had with me three belongings from each of them. I had my mother's pearl necklace which was a gift from her mother - my nana, who died when I was eight months old - the gold watch my dad had on him but never wore, and my brother's pocketknife. It was red and the paint on it had been scratched off, the knife dull, but it was something of my brother's and I wanted it for the funeral.  
In two week's time, we had reached Virginia and had ransacked abandoned campsites and broke into old cabins. We found enough food to get us by but not enough to leave our stomachs un-famished. We came across several zombie hoards but soaked our clothes in the stinking blood of the dead to keep our smells masked. Within days, the smell didn't really bother us anymore. Payge was most freaked out my it and she said the smell bothered her because she wanted to remain 'human enough' but we all knew she was lying to herself.


	2. Facing Loss

We made our way to South Carolina where Abby once lived before her parents went to jail. I've sworn myself to secrecy, so I won't tell you what happened or why her parents went to jail, so don't even think about asking me! Abby led us farther south to her hometown and to the house in which she grew up. It was there that we discovered the body of her mother. It was half-rotten from age and the scent of death was all around us.  
We didn't want to stay in Abby's old house - by her own request - so we took off into the woods behind her house. It was here that Abby told us there was a cliff side beyond the woods in a clearing, with a lake beyond the sheer drop. She told us that when she was a kid, she and her mom would go jumping off the cliff side while her dad waded in the lake below, waiting for them. Abby tried not to cry as she remembered her life before-before it went to Hell, because she told me her life was shit even before the apocalypse. We were headed to the cliff side clearing until we came upon five zombies. Abby let out a shriek until I clamped my hand over her mouth to cut her off, and Payge stepped back so Jasmine and I could go all psycho on the dead. I ran forward and jumped in the air, burying my hatchet into one of the zombie's heads, then kicking the other in the stomach with my foot, causing it to topple over a thorn bush. It's skin peeled off of it and blood pooled beneath it, staining the dirt red, almost brownish-black. The zombie clawed at my feet but I stomped on its head with my heel, and its brain squished under my foot.  
Jasmine took care of the other two, using a baseball bat to the jaw for one of the zombies and then crushing the windpipe of the other zombie, making its head fall to the ground. The last zombie chased after Abby and Payge and brought them to the cliff side. The two held hands as they ran from the zombie and stopped short over the cliff.  
"We can do this!" Abby shouted at Payge. Payge was reluctant to jump as she couldn't swim because she'd never been taught how. I couldn't blame her with the parents she had. Both were emotionally and physically draining with their absence and demands they placed on Payge, forcing her to raise her other siblings while they were out of the house working just to break even and get by.  
"Abby, no! No!" Payge shouted as Abby pulled her over the cliff side, both of them plummeting into the lake. It was I who took my axe and tossed it into the back of the zombie. It fell over the cliff, too, and fell into the water. Payge looked up to Jasmine and me and screamed bloody murder as the zombie fell right atop of her. Abby let out a cry as Payge disappeared into the murky water, a pool of blood forming around her. Abby dove down deeper into the water and emerged from it, calling up to Jasmine and me that Payge was dead. I felt drained, blaming myself for Payge's death, now seeing her pale-faced brunette-haired head bobbing up and down in the water, her green eyes open wide in complete and total fear. If I hadn't thrown the axe at the zombie... Payge might still be alive. It's my fault she's dead.  
"Payge..." Jasmine sank to her knees and let her tears fall, crying silently. Before all went to Hell, we were all so close. I was the leader of our high school clique, Abby was my second in command, Jasmine was our speed brawler and Grell Sutcliffe-obsessed anime-lover, and Payge was the motherly one despite bring younger than me by a year.  
There were three of us now, not four. We were the three musketeers and D'Artagnan, now minus the fourth member of our clan of friends.  
That night, I finally let myself cry silently as Abby and Jasmine tossed in their unpleasant slumbers. I knew what they were dreaming about as I looked over their horror-stricken sleeping faces. Abby was dreaming about Payge, blaming herself for making Payge jump into the lake after her, and Jasmine was most likely dreaming about how she could have fought the zombies differently, maybe letting loose her super-speed with brawling and slaughtering the dead freaks.


	3. Happenings in Georgia

We made our way down to Georgia after giving Payge a small funeral, burying her head in a small plot with black tulips as a headstone, carving the letter P into the dirt with them, and tried to recover our loss of Payge by fighting even harder to survive. Unfortunately, we were unable to recover the rest of her body or the axe that I threw into the back of the zombie that killed her. And Abby soon gave to me a journal and a multitude of black-ink pens so I could write down our story so someone in future generations would know us and our story. In thanking Abby, I began writing in my new journal every night after dealing with zombies.  
As we traveled, we came across groups of survivors who fought to live as we did, even if we didn't show ourselves to them, lurking in the shadows of the green forests down in the deep south. I thought about writing down descriptions of the people we came across but decided against it as it would take up too much space in my journal, so I then decided to write down all the names that survivors used when mentioning the zombies.  
Abby, Jasmine, and I called the zombies for what they were. Zombies. They were dead, unable to be helped by the living - as far as we knew - but many others we came across gave them other titles; biters, cold bodies, creeper, dead ones, floaters, 'geeks,' lame-brains, lurkers, monsters, roamers, rotters, skin-eaters, and even walkers. The terms seemed well-put but my two 'sisters,' and I called them zombies like the characters in the zombie apocalypse movies.  
What lay ahead of us three now was a highway blocked off by dozens upon dozens of cars. We were exhausted, tired from days and days of walking to Florida, running from zombies, and hiding from humans. We fought the dead and learned to fear the living.  
As we wandered through the crowded street of cars, with now-dead owners who once died to get out of the city to escape death... but failed... we came upon one car with paint - or soap, I didn't know - on the front window. It said:  
SOPHIA STAY HERE  
WE WILL COME EVERY DAY  
Abby cracked her neck from side to side as she thought about whomever this Sophia was, and wondered how old or little she was. I placed my wager that Sophia was a kid, younger than all of us. We were all eighteen - minus Jasmine, who was sixteen - so Sophia was probably ten or twelve years old.  
Jasmine sniffed the air and stopped. Abby and I whirled around quickly and looked to our friend. "What's the matter?" We asked at the same time.  
"I smell death!" Jasmine whispered quietly, but loud enough for us to hear her frightened words. I peered around the line of cars and saw there were a number of the walking dead come towards us. My eyes widened and I ushered for Abby and Jasmine to sneak under the cars while I opened the trunk of a red van and got inside, pulling a blood-soaked blanket over me to hide me and mask my scent - which probably smelled horrible, but it would make a difference to the zombies. Of that, I was certain. I moved around quickly enough with time to spare, looking for any sort of weapon. I was in luck for I found a tire iron right beside me and I gripped it tight, my heart pounding loudly as I heard the grunts and groans as the zombies walked past the car I was hiding in, and I listened closely in case Abby or Jasmine needed any assistance. I doubted I could help them, though, if they were indeed in trouble.  
I closed my eyes and listened to my breathing, my heart rate slowing down as I heard the footsteps of the dead fade away. I remained in the trunk of the car, knowing that Abby and Jasmine would know when the coast was clear to move about again.  
I held back a yelp as I heard too knocks on the rear window. "It's us. Don't worry. We're good now." I heard Abby's voice speak.  
We are far from good! I thought to myself, thinking of Payge. I got out of the trunk and stretched my muscles, then grabbing the tire iron and stretching again.  
"Who are y'all?" We heard a man's voice speak. The three of us turned swiftly, our backs from the hoard of zombies now out of our lines of sight, and saw a well-built man with dark hair, beads of sweat lining his forehead that made his bangs stick to his face. He wielded a crossbow and had it aimed at my head.  
"I'm [Y/N], and these are my friends Abby and Jasmine. Who are you?" I asked the man. He looked us over and saw we were all bloody messes, all of us in need of long showers.  
"I'm Daryl Dixon." The man said. I looked to Abby and Payge and saw their emotions in their eyes. Abby was fearful and Jasmine was untrusting, and me? I was rather taken by the rugged sexiness of this crossbowman. "Y'all are dumb for thinking y'all can survive out here alone. Where ya' headed?"  
"Florida." I said. "But we're out of food and weapons. We'll be on our way now." I turned to leave but heard Daryl's crossbow click, and I turned back to face him. "Are you going to end our miseries now or are you going to help us?" I asked quickly, my voice harsh. Daryl looked me over again and took in a deep breath, lowering his crossbow.  
"I ain't a killer. At least, not for y'all lady livings. Come with me and I'll get y'all some food and some weapons, and y'all can be on yer' way." Abby's eyes softened and Jasmine's grip on her weapon loosened. I let out a deep exhale only to realize I hadn't been breathing at all. "Follow me," said Daryl, and we three followed him down the car-crowded road.  
"Where are you taking us?" Jasmine asked in a cold tone.  
"I'm taking ya'll to the farmhouse. Rick and Hershel may keep you on the farm for a few days and help ya' get yer' strength up... or they'll kill ya'll. The decision ain't up to me." I stopped and Abby and Jasmine and I exchanged worried glances, but then we continued. We couldn't do worse than what we were doing now... or so I thought.


End file.
